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Author: Nancy Thomason
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781986101547
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 184
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Book Description
Nancy Thomason lived with a mother who was paranoid schizophrenic, a diagnosis known only after she was institutionalized. Until then, no one talked about it. Not the police who visited often. Not Nancy's friends who were busy being teenagers. Not her school teachers and counselors, who wondered what was going on. Not the social workers who found a place for her and her brother to live. No one had word for what her mother left behind. Except hell.
Author: Nancy Thomason
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781986101547
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 184
Get Book Here
Book Description
Nancy Thomason lived with a mother who was paranoid schizophrenic, a diagnosis known only after she was institutionalized. Until then, no one talked about it. Not the police who visited often. Not Nancy's friends who were busy being teenagers. Not her school teachers and counselors, who wondered what was going on. Not the social workers who found a place for her and her brother to live. No one had word for what her mother left behind. Except hell.
Author: Grace M. Cho
Publisher: Feminist Press at CUNY
ISBN: 1952177952
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 231
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Book Description
Finalist for the 2021 National Book Award for Nonfiction Winner of the 2022 Asian/Pacific American Award in Literature A TIME and NPR Best Book of the Year in 2021 This evocative memoir of food and family history is "somehow both mouthwatering and heartbreaking... [and] a potent personal history" (Shelf Awareness). Grace M. Cho grew up as the daughter of a white American merchant marine and the Korean bar hostess he met abroad. They were one of few immigrants in a xenophobic small town during the Cold War, where identity was politicized by everyday details—language, cultural references, memories, and food. When Grace was fifteen, her dynamic mother experienced the onset of schizophrenia, a condition that would continue and evolve for the rest of her life. Part food memoir, part sociological investigation, Tastes Like War is a hybrid text about a daughter’s search through intimate and global history for the roots of her mother’s schizophrenia. In her mother’s final years, Grace learned to cook dishes from her parent’s childhood in order to invite the past into the present, and to hold space for her mother’s multiple voices at the table. And through careful listening over these shared meals, Grace discovered not only the things that broke the brilliant, complicated woman who raised her—but also the things that kept her alive. “An exquisite commemoration and a potent reclamation.” —Booklist (starred review) “A wrenching, powerful account of the long-term effects of the immigrant experience.” —Kirkus Reviews
Author: Gloria Steinem
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0812988353
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Gloria Steinem—writer, activist, organizer, and inspiring leader—tells a story she has never told before, a candid account of her life as a traveler, a listener, and a catalyst for change. ONE OF O: THE OPRAH MAGAZINE’S TEN FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR | NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Harper’s Bazaar • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • Publishers Weekly When people ask me why I still have hope and energy after all these years, I always say: Because I travel. Taking to the road—by which I mean letting the road take you—changed who I thought I was. The road is messy in the way that real life is messy. It leads us out of denial and into reality, out of theory and into practice, out of caution and into action, out of statistics and into stories—in short, out of our heads and into our hearts. Gloria Steinem had an itinerant childhood. When she was a young girl, her father would pack the family in the car every fall and drive across country searching for adventure and trying to make a living. The seeds were planted: Gloria realized that growing up didn’t have to mean settling down. And so began a lifetime of travel, of activism and leadership, of listening to people whose voices and ideas would inspire change and revolution. My Life on the Road is the moving, funny, and profound story of Gloria’s growth and also the growth of a revolutionary movement for equality—and the story of how surprising encounters on the road shaped both. From her first experience of social activism among women in India to her work as a journalist in the 1960s; from the whirlwind of political campaigns to the founding of Ms. magazine; from the historic 1977 National Women’s Conference to her travels through Indian Country—a lifetime spent on the road allowed Gloria to listen and connect deeply with people, to understand that context is everything, and to become part of a movement that would change the world. In prose that is revealing and rich, Gloria reminds us that living in an open, observant, and “on the road” state of mind can make a difference in how we learn, what we do, and how we understand each other. Praise for My Life on the Road “This legendary feminist makes a compelling case for traveling as listening: a way of letting strangers’ stories flow, as she puts it, ‘out of our heads and into our hearts.’”—People “Like Steinem herself, [My Life on the Road] is thoughtful and astonishingly humble. It is also filled with a sense of the momentous while offering deeply personal insights into what shaped her.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “A lyrical meditation on restlessness and the quest for equity . . . Part of the appeal of My Life is how Steinem, with evocative, melodic prose, conveys the air of discovery and wonder she felt during so many of her journeys. . . . The lessons imparted in Life on the Road offer more than a reminiscence. They are a beacon of hope for the future.”—USA Today “A warmly companionable look back at nearly five decades as itinerant feminist organizer and standard-bearer. If you’ve ever wondered what it might be like to sit down with Ms. Steinem for a casual dinner, this disarmingly intimate book gives a pretty good idea, mixing hard-won pragmatic lessons with more inspirational insights.”—The New York Times “Steinem rocks. My Life on the Road abounds with fresh insights and is as populist as can be.”—The Boston Globe
Author: Kelly F. Holland
Publisher: Balboa Press
ISBN: 1452594155
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 164
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Book Description
Early in my life, I faced great challenges. I could not be a child like my siblings or my classmates. My journey was different. In my school, I learned about schizophrenia and physical violence. My teacher was very powerful. As an adolescent I lost my way. I became a ward of the court and completed my high school education while living in a state group home. In 1989, at age twenty-six, I met an exemplary professional who began to show me the way. For the next twenty years and beyond, I learned lessons of discipline, love, and respect for self and others. Soon, my lifes success began to unfold. At age twenty-six, I received my lifes primary gift. In 1999, I became on fire for my life, because of the excellence that I had witnessed in another person. I began to dream of talking to the world about the excellence that lives within each one of us. I relocated my life to the desert Southwest. It was there that I began to hear my hearts song and awaken to the excellence of my lifes journey. It was there that I discovered the wisdom of my lifes teachings. I believe that no matter what circumstances you may find yourself in, excellence is present. And, no matter how desolate you may feel, when you find the fire, the inspiration, and the music of your heart there isnt anything that can keep you from living your lifes dreams. ???
Author: Claire Phillips
Publisher: Doppelhouse Press
ISBN: 9781733957908
Category : Mentally ill
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
"I am going blind. I am going blind," my mother would proclaim whenever I would call her in the psychiatric hospital, from almost three thousand miles away in Los Angeles. "By tomorrow," my mother would shout into the phone, "I will be blind." For years she had coped on her own until her doctor reduced her Haldol in hopes of decreasing harmful neurological side effects. The results were cataclysmic. This would be one of many relapses after receiving a diagnosis for paranoid schizophrenia in her mid-forties, after a ten-year prolonged psychosis during which my mother worked as criminal public defense counsel on behalf of some of New York and New Jersey's most disadvantaged residents. A Room with a Darker View is an unflinching, feminist work that chronicles the author's troubled relationship with her mother, an Oxford-trained lawyer, whose severe illness -- marked by manic bouts of senseless laughter, persistent delusions, and florid hallucinations -- went unrecognized for decades by both her husband, a world-class British astrophysicist, and her father, a Jewish-Zimbabwean doctor knighted by Pope Paul VI. Told in fragments, flashbacks, and chronicling the most extreme but unfortunately common aspects of schizophrenia, this elegantly written memoir is a reflection on illness, shame, and the generation gaps that have defined mother-daughter relationships amid the evolution of feminism in the 20th century. Like Porochista Khakpour's lauded memoir, Sick (2018), A Room with a Darker View is not a linear tale of redemption or restitution. Rather, it challenges conceptions about mental illness, difficulties caring for an aging parent with a chronic disease, and how we frame contributions by outliers to society, while offering a scathing look at a broken medical system, the unwillingness of an elite educated family to reckon with its secrets, and finally, the universally-understood difficulty of caring for an aging parent with a chronic illness. Unsurprisingly, feminists have been at the forefront of writing illness narratives, from Virginia Woolf to Audre Lord and Susan Sontag. My family's inability to accommodate my mother's illness, the perniciousness of her particular subtype of schizophrenia, paranoia, and the story of women's fight for gender equality in both the workplace and at home are part of this chronicle. In 500-word vignettes A Room with a Darker View retrospectively examines the trauma of undiagnosed mental illness besieging a mother-daughter relationship from toddlerhood through college and into the author's adult life as a writer and lecturer. Of particular note, the author documents her mother's determination in trying to find a place for herself in the male dominated field of law in the 1970s, and her equal determination to recover some semblance of a life after a difficult diagnosis, as she becomes heavily medicated and impoverished by divorce. Only with her mother's final relapse at 73 did the author begin to tell this story, first in Black Clock, an essay for which she received a Pushcart nomination and notable mention in The Best American Essays 2015.
Author: Nikole Benders-Hadi
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319013181
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 339
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Book Description
Despite the importance of regaining social roles during recovery from mental illness, the intersection between motherhood and serious mental illness is often overlooked. This book aims to rectify that neglect. A series of introductory chapters describing current research and services available to mothers with serious mental illness are followed by personal accounts of clients reflecting on their parenting experiences. One goal of the book is to provide clinicians with information that they can use to help patients struggling with questions and barriers in their attempts to parent. The inclusion of personal accounts of mothers on issues such as stigma, fears and discrimination in the context of parenting with a mental illness is intended to promote the message of mental illness recovery to a larger audience as well. Finally, it is hoped that this handbook will help inspire more research on mothers with mental illness and the creation of more services tailored to their needs.
Author: Judy O’Brien
Publisher: Balboa Press
ISBN: 1504302362
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 193
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Book Description
The Voice of Spirit: A Mediums Story introduces a clinical nurse specialist whose vocation to become a medium led her to devote her full attention to the messages that spirits desire to share with the people they have left behind in this world. Judy OBrien, whose work has given rise to her business, Angels Amongst Us, speaks with a conversational and honest voice in the pages of this book that blends the genres and intentions of a memoir, a spiritual reflection, and a guide. As the author tells her lifes story, she notes, I can communicate with loved ones who have crossed over. I have been aware of this abilityor giftsince I was five, but it wasnt until many years later, that I wanted to learn more about spirituality and understand the messages I was receiving because I had always thought they were just my intuition. Readers following her on the journey narrated in The Voice of Spirit will traverse the same path of deepening insight and recognize the blessings that come from listening to the messages that arise and contemplating their sources and meanings. In The Voice of Spirit: A Mediums Story, Judy OBrien desires to validate the existence of spirits for all whom those same spirits have left behind. As you read her story, you can find hope and peace and appreciate the love that transcends the boundaries of the physical world and that beckons you toward the spiritual world in which eternal love never dies.
Author: Avital Norman Nathman
Publisher: Seal Press
ISBN: 1580055036
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 290
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Book Description
In an era of mommy blogs, Pinterest, and Facebook, The Good Mother Myth dismantles the social media-fed notion of what it means to be a "good mother." This collection of essays takes a realistic look at motherhood and provides a platform for real voices and raw stories, each adding to the narrative of motherhood we don't tend to see in the headlines or on the news. From tales of mind-bending, panic-inducing overwhelm to a reflection on using weed instead of wine to deal with the terrible twos, the honesty of the essays creates a community of mothers who refuse to feel like they're in competition with others, or with the notion of the ideal mom—they're just trying to find a way to make it work. With a foreword by Christy Turlington Burns and a contributor list that includes Jessica Valenti, Sharon Lerner, Soraya Chemaly, Amber Dusick and many more, this remarkable collection seeks to debunk the myth and offer some honesty about what it means to be a mother.
Author: Randye Kaye
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 1442210915
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
When readers first meet Ben, he is a sweet, intelligent, seemingly well-adjusted youngster. Fast forward to his teenage years, though, and Ben's life has spun out of control. Ben is swept along by an illness over which he has no control—one that results in runaway episodes, periods of homelessness, seven psychotic breaks, seven hospitalizations, and finally a diagnosis and treatment plan that begins to work. Schizophrenia strikes an estimated one in a hundred people worldwide by some estimates, and yet understanding of the illness is lacking. Through Ben's experiences, and those of his mother and sister, who supported Ben through every stage of his illness and treatment, readers gain a better understanding of schizophrenia, as well as mental illness in general, and the way it affects individuals and families. Here, Kaye encourages families to stay together and find strength while accepting the reality of a loved one's illness; she illustrates, through her experiences as Ben's mother, the delicate balance between letting go and staying involved. She honors the courage of anyone who suffers with mental illness and is trying to improve his life and participate in his own recovery. Ben Behind His Voices also reminds professionals in the psychiatric field that every patient who comes through their doors has a life, one that he has lost through no fault of his own. It shows what goes right when professionals treat the family as part of the recovery process and help them find support, education, and acceptance. And it reminds readers that those who suffer from mental illness, and their families, deserve respect, concern, and dignity.
Author: Tara E. Holley
Publisher: Harper Perennial
ISBN: 9780380723027
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 369
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Book Description
Separated from her mother at an early age, Tara Elgin Holley became her mother's legal guardian at age 16 and set about trying to rescue the blonde fairy princess she remembered from the shambling street person her mother had become. An inspiring story of one woman's struggle to struggle through the pain to reach a better understanding of her mother, herself and a devastating mental illness.
